| HN Mirror

To be fair, and without denying all the crimes and exploitation made by European countries in their colonies, we don't have to forget that a lot of those places had tribes/clans/countries that were waging wars again each others and the European countries profited of this by allying first with one side to defeat the other. When the colonies were disbanded, the tribes/clans/countries often resumed fights what were interrupted. When a country was really united, it had its chances to oppose an invader : look at Ethiopia who won against Italy in 1895/1896 and would have won again in 1935/1936 if Germany hadn't come to win for them. So yes, the British and French mostly drew lines based on french/english negociation, sometimes based on the geography, sometimes just for geometrical and area reasons, and that played its part in the later wars once colonies were over, but that is hardly the only reason, and it is not even the main reason I think. At the moment, in the Middle-East, the fight between people is either for religious reasons (Sunni vs Shia mostly), for clans supremacy and oil (look at the Qatar situation now), or for "I was there first"/"God is on my side" reasons (Israel vs Palestine). The borders created by the colonists played their part, but the mix of population in my opinion is such that those points above would have triggered wars wherever borders had been drawn. So in the end, I agree with you: one cannot "create" a federal state. It is incredibly difficult with countries in peace and having strong relations (like Europe), and the other successful examples are based on war : the first emperor of China united through war by defeating the warring states (and China, even if an authoritarian state centralized for politics is quite federal regarding other aspects), the US created themselves by invading the native tribes state by state. Had Napoleon succeeded, maybe Europe would have been a federative state, at the cost of many wars and deaths also.